UT scientist gets $7M breast cancer research boost

Mauro Ferrari, a nanomedicine scientist at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, has received a five-year, $7 million Innovator Award from the U.S. Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program to develop a new delivery system for breast cancer drugs.

If successful, the new approach could increase the efficiency of drug delivery by concentrating more drug at the site of a tumor, which could also reduce side effects of the drugs.

Right now when doctors inject a breast cancer drug, only one of every 100,000 drug molecules reaches malignant cells. The remaining drug circulates through blood vessels and can kill healthy, non-cancerous tissue.

Ferrari’s proposed solution is to package these drugs in miniaturized carriers engineered to search out, recognize and release their payload at the site of the tumor.

These nanocarriers are about one-hundredth the size of a strand of hair and their contents are measured in billionths of a meter (nanometers).

Ferrari is deputy chairman of the biomedical engineering department at the UT Health Science Center, an inter-institutional venture that also involves the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and The University of Texas at Austin. He also is an adjunct professor of bioengineering at Rice University, adjunct professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and adjunct professor of mathematics and mechanical engineering at the University of Houston.

His team includes leaders in mathematical design, particle fabrication and pre-clinical testing from the UT Health Science Center and M.D. Anderson.